Televisions monitors are typically designed to display a composite video signal with a frame refresh rate of either 70 Hz or 60 Hz, wherein each frame consists of two interlaced fields. One field includes all of the odd lines of the frame. The other field includes all of the even fields of the frame. A refresh rate of 60 Hz or 70 Hz means that the two interlaced fields are alternately displayed on a television monitor at a rate of either 60 or 70 half-frames (interlaced) per second.
An artifact of this arrangement is that fine details with high contrast, such as thin white lines on a black background, may be contained only within one of these fields. This causes fine details to flicker on a television display because the field which contains the fine detail is refreshed at half the frequency of the entire frame and is alternated with the other field, which does not contain the fine detail. This flickering often causes detailed images such as digital images (e.g., Web pages, font characters, bit-mapped images, and so on), which were originally designed for display on a computer monitor to be difficult to read on an interlaced television display; especially the display of characters (e.g., letters, numbers punctuation, etc.) that are output onto a television monitor based on structurally intricate or complex fonts such as East Asian fonts.
The following described arrangements and procedures address this limitation and other limitations of traditional systems and procedures to prepare font characters for display on interlaced monitors.